No, robots aren’t taking over. But the future is dazzling

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Nigel Shadbolt: This is the dawn of a new age of artificial intelligence

Imagine as I sit here typing this article that I have two dialogues going on
via my computer terminal. I can’t see who is on the other end but I can ask
questions. The challenge is to tell which is a computer program and which is
the human.

In 1950 Alan Turing, the great British mathematician after whom this Turing
test is named, made a bold prediction: “I believe that in about 50 years’
time it will be possible to programme computers . . . to make them play the
imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than